Overview

Atma Jaya Catholic University of Indonesia was founded in 1960 by a group of scholars under Atma Jaya Foundation. The university currently runs eight faculties, seventeen undergraduate courses, and seven graduate courses. Atma Jaya’s philosophy to constantly improve the quality of education is demonstrated by the implementation of modern IT solutions at the university.

“We were one of the first educational institutions to implement an online academic system in the early 90’s in Indonesia. Our academic system was initially built as part of our intranet system, which then became a web-based version in early 2000,” says Danny Natalies, Head of IT, Atma Jaya Catholic University of Jakarta.

Challenges

The growing number of students, staff, and partners increased the complexity of administrative tasks within the university’s IT environment. The amount of data traffic rose and the data was scattered. The urgency for a new IT infrastructure to handle the process became apparent. However, acquiring, maintaining, configuring, housing, and powering the servers proved to be too expensive.

“We tried to be more efficient in the development of the data centre, but there were space and resource concerns every time a new server came into our data centre. We used to have several servers running for each faculty in the university. Once we redesigned the process of our data centre, we were overwhelmed by the number of servers we needed to fit in. The system suffered several downtimes due to heavy traffic. That was when we decided to start running a virtualised environment,” says Natalies.

The change in management and staff turnover at Atma Jaya Foundation and within the university have raised issues concerning the compromise of data that could potentially result in data loss.

In addition, Microsoft’s early announcement to stop support for Windows XP in April, 2014 forced the university to implement a new IT security solution to protect their systems and academic data. With more than 1,400 workstations running Windows XP at the university, security concerns were elevated.

A new solution was needed due to the repeated downtime caused by system overloads which plagued the company’s hosting provider. The IT managers were encouraged to consider virtualised system as a solution. The institution sought a virtualised system that could build a solid and reliable foundation for new technology trends, including mobile, cloud, and social.

“We have managed to achieve zero infection in all workstations connection within our IT ecosys- tem. All of security threats have been detected and blocked. With the presence of Trend Micro’s agentless security technology, IT support and maintenance resources have been decreasing to a minimum level, hence our IT team can focus on other project development.”

Danny Natalies,Head of IT,Atma Jaya Catholic
University of Indonesia, Jakarta

In 2011, the university implemented VMware vSphere 5.0 technology for 20 licensed hosts with a total of 60 virtualised servers to support the university’s IT virtualisation and VMware Horizon View.

With a new virtualised environment in place, the university needed to address additional security concerns. In the past, the university relied only on Internet and Intranet firewall for network security. In order to enhance system protection, they installed antivirus (AV). The average number of viruses quarantined in each server reached 40-200. With AV agents installed on every virtual machine and simultaneous AV updates on a regular basis, it resulted in an overall deterioration of performance for the servers. This primarily affected the virtual servers.

With a large number of in-house applications that developers were highly dependent on, the system was open to vulnerabilities. IT operators were required to perform server patching on a regular basis. With many tailored applications running in the system, server patching was not an easy task to perform. Operators had to run tests every time they performed server patching, but to schedule patching tasks for 72 physical and 121 virtual servers was a mission impossible.

The university quickly became aware that the growing complexity of its IT management put it at risk for targeted attacks. The institution demanded a multi-layered security system that could enhance the capability to detect, analyse, and block threats with high visibility of malicious activity both in the host and network levels.

Solution

In order to fit with the requirement of a lightweight server based security solution for virtualisation in the data centre, the university deployed Trend Micro™ Deep Security™. Deep Security is equipped with a wide range of agentless security, including anti-malware, integrity monitoring for files and hypervisor, intrusion detection and prevention, Web application protection, application control, and bidirectional firewall.

“Unlike solutions which install agents on individual virtual PCs, Trend Micro Deep Security is agentless and can offload processes such as virus scans to virtual machines through the integra- tion with VMware Horizon View. No server overload occurred when virus scans were performed upon simultaneous access, and when pattern files were updated. What amazes us is that we can directly patch all vulnerabilities from the servers virtually,” says Natalies.

The institution also implemented Trend Micro™ Deep Discovery™, which uniquely detects and identifies evasive threats in real time, and then provides in-depth analysis and relevant actionable intelligence to assess, remediate, and defend the system against targeted attacks.

“Trend Micro Deep Discovery allows our IT team to monitor unusual data traffic in real-time, reducing the number of security breaches and illegal access to a minimum level. Our IT team receives an alert and instant notification for every potential threat running within the system. The solution significantly reduces our operational efforts and allows us to spend more time in other areas. We no longer need to run back and forth to help every user with potential threats,” says Natalies.

“Unlike solutions which install agents on individual virtual PCs, Trend Micro Deep Security is agentless and can offload processes such as virus scans to virtual machines through the integra- tion with VMware Horizon View.”

Danny Natalies,Head of IT,Atma Jaya Catholic
University of Indonesia, Jakarta

Results

Trend Micro’s end-to-end security solution has proven to be the best solution to meet the requirement of Atma Jaya Catholic Universityof Jakarta’s IT environment.

“Trend Micro Deep Security with agentless technology is the perfect fit for our virtualised data centre. Since the first implementation in 2013, we have not seen any server performance issues. One major breakthrough is that 100% of threats have been detected and blocked upon the implementation. Deep Security also allows us to do virtual patching on our in-house applications with ease,” says Natalies.

Deep Security is lightweight and the agentless feature has been proven to deliver maximum protection with minimum impact on server performance.

The flexibility of Trend Micro’s security solution for many operating systems and in-house applications has also proven to be a positive factor for the implementation within the university’s IT ecosystem. IT team is now able to upgrade workstations periodically without having to worry about potential threats and malware coming in during the process.

“We have managed to achieve zero infections in all workstations connected within our IT ecosystem, and all security threats have been detected and blocked. With the presence of agentless security technology, IT support and maintenance resources have been decreased to a minimum level. Our IT team can now focus on other projects,” says Natalies.

Trend Micro Deep Security solutions can offload heavy processes, such as virus scans to virtual machines with the so-called "agentless security" in the university’s IT system, while enabling regulatory compliance and accelerating ROI of IT investment.
Trend Micro uses leading and innovative methods behind each and every security solution to predict relatively unknown potential threats by analysing system and user behavior.

“We are more than happy with the great support given by Trend Micro’s Indonesia team. Every support request has been handled professionally with fast response times. We often get same-day solutions by Trend Micro’s Indonesia support team, which is by far the best customer service we have ever experienced. We are glad to choose Trend Micro as our only security solution supplier and look forward to a long lasting partnership.”

“We often get same-day solutions by Trend Micro’s Indonesia support team, which is by far the best customer service we have ever experienced. We are glad to choose Trend Micro as our only security solution supplier and look forward to a long lasting partnership.”

Danny Natalies,Head of IT,Atma Jaya Catholic
University of Indonesia, Jakarta